April 2003

- Your main defense (assuming you are a Windows user) is to keep up with Microsoft Updates. Unfortunately, that can cause its own share of difficulty. I did this recently at a small office: four of the five machines took Windows Updates successfully, but the fifth would not reboot. It took about an hour of work to get that machine back up and running. Regardless of that risk, these updates need to be done, and you need to check back for new updates very regularly.

- The first thing I liked about this is something we are starting to see more frequently: some use of color in the text. Photos and screen shots are still black and white (still too expensive to do that much yet), but section headings are nicely set off in purple. Such a small thing, and probably something that will become very common soon, but it enhanced my reading experience.

- Since each building has a T1 router, I wrote a small program to log the routers messages to a text file. While performing these upgrades, I ran into some small trouble with my code, which relies on the perl module: "Device::SerialPort".